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A comprehensive paid advertising strategy should include paid search, display advertising, and paid advertising on social media which, used together, will build brand awareness, boost your ranking, maximize your visibility, and increase ROI.

Paid Search

You can create and optimize a paid search campaign with almost any size budget using PPC. One of the advantages of PPC is its incredible measurability, which helps you, executive, your campaign successfully and continue to optimize and improve your results. You can research and execute a keyword strategy, then study the results to figure out what works and what doesn’t work. Running a PPC campaign effectively involves:

• Keywords: For starters, you plan your keywords and the Search terms to Choose a combination of broad match and phrase match, which drives traffic, then select exact match only for keywords that convert particularly well.
• Budget: Keyword Planner also provides detailed click and cost performance forecasts, and allows you to make an educated decision about how much money you want Google to spend to display your ads. You can use it to help you plan your budget and give you an understanding of the potential cost of driving traffic to your site.
• Optimization: Text ads for PPC generally include a title (25 characters), a display URL (37 characters) and two description lines (35 characters each). Maximize the power of this small amount of copy by including a strong selling point and at least two CTAs, as well as relevant keywords. After monitoring the performance of your ads, you can tweak your titles and CTAs.

Display Advertising

The CTR (click-through rates) for banner ads may be low, but that does not mean you can disregard display advertising completely. Display advertising is an effective marketing tool, so much so that for 2016, digital display ad spending is expected to be greater than search ad spending. Why? Display spending is great for building brand awareness and developing trust. Before you get started, consider your targeting options—it’s best to try out a mix and experiment until you find what works best for you:

• Keyword Targeting: Match ads using selected keywords and topics, so your ad is shown on a website that is contextually relevant.
• Placement Targeting: Decide which publisher sites you’d like to advertise on. Since this is a very focused kind of targeting, I recommend starting small, to gauge effectiveness.
• Remarketing: Show ads to users who already visited your site, but left the site without making a purchase—a target audience that is much more likely to convert.

Social Advertising

Paid advertising on social media has become an essential component of any social media strategy. There are countless social media platforms; find out which platforms are most popular with your target audience before you get started. The key players are Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which allow you to target your audience based on a range of very specific parameters including location, age, gender, language and interests—and help you target individuals who have already expressed an interest in your brand.

Mix & Match

Online advertising has a number of advantages: It’s measurable and highly sophisticated with regards to targeting, and you can calculate how much revenue resulted from each investment. Choosing the right advertising approach can be a tough call, and generally requires careful experimentation over time. By starting with a small budget and systematically tracking the results of each strategy, you can maximize results and obtain the perfect combination for your business.